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[AlanB]

I thought that I would steal part of that famous line from Waldo, and of course later Matt Lauer, “Where in the US is AlanB” Well as you may have already guessed from where I’ve made this post, I’m on a train. Since I can connect my laptop to the net, via my cell phone, I thought that I’d give you a bit of a running commentary from my trip. However, I’m not going to tell you where I’m going during this running narrative, only where I’ve already been. So in that vein, I met my mother (since I couldn’t get my wife to join me), this morning at the Port Authority’s main bus terminal on 42nd Street in NY City. A quick ride on the A train to 34th street brought us to NY’s Penn Station. After checking into the Club Acela Lounge, we waited about an hour and a half to board Amtrak regional train #95. Train 95 was running a bit late out of Boston, so it pulled in just about the time it was scheduled to depart at 10:35 AM. We therefore departed 10 minutes late at 10:45 AM. The ride by and large went without incident. Kevin Korell joined us at Metro Park for the first leg of our trip to DC. Probably the biggest item of note for this trip, was our café attendant who definitely provided the example that all Amtrak employee’s should follow. He was polite, he was jovial, and he was quick and efficient. As he was giving my mom her total for lunch, I mentioned to him that we were both in Business Class (since she hadn’t, even though she was holding her ticket stub). He proceeded to embarrass me by telling me that her name was Grace, since he had already seen her ticket, even though I didn’t think that he had been paying attention. Again, kudo’s to our café attendant for actually paying attention to the people he was serving. Our arrival into WAS, was almost an hour late. We arrived at 2:36, scheduled was 1:48 PM. I haven’t stopped to see where we lost more time, but obviously we lost quite a bit. After our arrival, I used my AGR Select Plus card to get Kevin into the DC Club Acela, while my mom and I entered using our first class sleeper tickets for the Capitol Limited. Kevin and I chatted for a while, even as I was busy checking on the various train boards.

[AlanB]

Around 3:35 or so, they called us for boarding on the Capitol and we said goodbye to Kevin. Kevin would return to Metro Park on Acela 2172, which in theory left exactly 5 minutes after we did. My mom and I boarded train #29 in car 2901, and headed to our home for the night, room #13. We left WAS precisely on time at 3:55 PM. Our sleeping car attendant, Brenda, greeted us at the door and instructed us on where to go, even though I already knew. Shortly after departure, she came around to instruct us on our room and give us the info on dinner reservations and breakfast. Even though I already knew everything about the room and the train, I let Brenda go through her speech, such that my mother got the full treatment. So far our ride has been largely uneventful, other than one passenger who didn’t listen to announcements at Martinsburg. Prior to every stop after leaving DC, the conductor would warn people of the upcoming station stop, and tell everyone to exit only where they saw a crew member. At Martinsburg, one passenger didn’t listen to that announcement as was seen running through the train by the AC (Assistant Conductor), who implored the Conductor not to depart until the passenger reached her door. We made reservations for a 6:30 PM seating in the dinning car. This was to be my first experience with Simplified Dining Service (SBS). The service IMHO, was excellent! Our LSA (Lead Service Attendant) Suzanne was quite cheerful, polite, and happy to assist people. Even our waiter was right on the money overall and very prompt with the food. Almost too prompt. I barely had time to finish my salad, before he was serving the main course. He did forget to bring me my water, but since I had ordered wine and he got everyone else at the table’s drinks, I forgave him. The food itself, left a bit to be desired, but it wasn’t terrible either. We both had Cod, with baked potato and broccoli. The food could have been a tad warmer, especially the cod, but again considering how it’s prepared, it wasn’t what I dreaded it might be. That said, I still think that it was a mistake for Amtrak to try SBS, at least as far as the food prep is concerned. Since the overall service was very good, I have to applaud at least this crew, if not Amtrak for that part of SBS. As I post this from Connellsville, PA area, we are currently running 45 minutes down and I’ll be signing off for the night. More come tomorrow.

[AlanB]

Well it’s now morning and we are riding through Indiana, albeit rather slowly. When we first woke up around 6:15 AM EDT, we were doing ok with regard to freight interference, but now that we’re getting close to Chicago NS delays are increasing. We were running just shy of 1 hour down at Waterloo, by Elkhart we were one hour and 4 minutes down. Then we really started getting dumped on by NS, as is the tradition in this area. By South Bend we had lost another 10 minutes and it’s been stop and go since then. In any event after getting dressed, we headed for breakfast in the dining car, which was about half full when we first entered. However it filled up quickly after our arrival. I of course ordered my favorite breakfast food, French Toast. Like last night’s dinner, it was again served very quickly and it wasn’t too bad. Again SDS is a disappointment compared to the traditional Amtrak dining car, but still not the disaster that I was worried it might be. The next update will either come from the Metropolitan Lounge in Chicago or from our next train later tonight.

[AlanB]

Well our arrival into Chicago by my watch was at 10:04 AM, which puts us at 94 minutes late, not too bad for Amtrak and the Capitol Limited. As is usual for the Capitol we first took the wye, dropped our one ExpressTrak car on the first leg of the wye, and then proceeded to back into Union Station. As I detrained, I gave Brenda our attendant a nice tip as her service had been just fine. While we were hardly demanding passengers, she was right on top of most things from what I could see. She had walked through the car at least 4 times the prior evening checking with each room to see if they were ready to have their beds put down. While we were off at breakfast, with no effort on my part, she had returned our room to its daytime configuration. So I was quite pleased with her performance. Once off the train, our first order of business was to checkin at the Metropolitan Lounge, so that we could leave our bags there while wandering around Chicago. An attendant whose name I sadly don’t recall, but I’ve seen her before, was swift, polite, and courteous. Thank goodness Amtrak got rid of those old attendants who used to work the lounge some three or more years ago. They were horrible to the point where people sometimes dreaded going into the lounge. Once checked in, we immediately handed our bags over to the redcap manning the luggage room, and off we went for a bit of a walking tour of the loop, with a side trip down to see Lake Michigan. I won’t bore you with those details. After a very nice lunch at Giordano’s, we then returned to CUS and the lounge. I took advantage of the new Wi-Fi service in the lounge to do some non-train related web work. Hence this update is once again coming to you from our current train.

[AlanB]

After watching the lounge empty out with the departure of passengers for first the Zephyr, then the Empire Builder, and finally the Texas Eagle, they called for our train. As usual everyone trouped out the back door of the lounge onto track #30. While 4 ExpressTrak cars had been added to the rear, this was otherwise the same train consist that had carried us into Chicago this morning. I didn’t have time to walk the consist, so I can’t be sure if the two engines that pulled us into CUS are still on the head end or not. If they are however still there, one more P42 was tacked onto the head end as we now have three motors. We left CUS right on time at 2:45 PM to start our long journey. At our last stop, LaPlata, we were running 7 minutes down, this despite two yellow flag zones, only one of which was planned. The crew had no warning about the second yellow flag, but thankfully they hadn’t yet even started to accelerate back to track speed from the first yellow flag. Last night on the Cap, we had the cycle #1 menu, tonight we seem to be using the cycle #3 menu. While last night’s meal was acceptable, especially given the mandates of SDS, tonight’s was outstanding. But for not having glassware, and no ice cream lol, frankly I couldn’t tell the difference between the old and the new. Either this chef knew what the heck he was doing, or the commissary out of Chicago is better than the one out of DC, or maybe a combination of both. All I know is bravo! to the dining crew of the SW Chief. Everyone at my table enjoyed this meal. I made it a point to compliment the LSA Natasha and her crew for the excellent meal, when she came to collect for my bottle of wine. In an odd coincidence we were seated with someone traveling back home to California from Pennsylvania. They had made the transfer last night in Pittsburgh to the Cap. In any event, it turns out that we have a mutual friend, even though neither of us had ever met. Talk about a small world to meet up with someone that knows the same person as you, on a specific date, on a specific train, at the same seating time when reservations are given at random, and then to end up at the very same table. We crossed the mighty Miss while at dinner, and just shortly before nightfall. Hopefully connection pending, I’ll get some pictures up tomorrow. As I write this, we should be just about 20 minutes from Kansas City, so I’m going to close on that note so as to be ready to post this when we arrive.

[AlanB]

Just a quick post from Gallup to let everyone know that thanks to a freight derailment west of ABQ, we were bused from ABQ to Gallup, while pax from train 4 reversed the procedure to ABQ. Both consists were turned to head back to their original starting points. I'll try to post a more detailed update later tonight, if I have a signal.

[AlanB]

Here's a picture that I took from the bus of the derailment. I'll try to see if I can't clean it up some later tonight, but I wanted to get something up before leaving Gallup.



Just to the right of the center of the picture with the red section, topped by a white Road Railer, is a double stack now a quad stack. And there were at least another 15 to 20 RR's in a large pile in that same area.

[AlanB]

A few more notes about the freight derailment, before I get out of range of on my cell signal. I believe that the conductor told us that 22 cars went on the ground and wiped out both mains for over 900 feet. Amtrak is hoping that tomorrow's Chiefs in both directions will be able to run through, but BNSF has not guarenteed anything. So Amtrak is making contingency plans for tomorrow just in case, but I've no doubt that they are hoping that they don't have to bus tomorrow.

[AlanB]

Now returning to our regularly scheduled program. Shortly after leaving Kansas City we had our attendant Carol make up our beds for us and we headed off to sleep. Come morning we found ourselves still in Kansas, but not for long. Within 15 minutes of our waking up, we had entered Colorado. We had breakfast around 8:30 AM as we stopped at La Junta. At our next stop, Trinidad, I got off to take a few pictures of our train. We also picked up our National Park’ guides at Trinidad. Around 11:00 AM I got a call from Steve (steve4031) who like others was busy following our progress. He warned us of a looming problem, a freight derailment just west of ABQ. Shortly before talking with Steve, the OSB team had an unusual meeting in the dining car. Unusual in the sense that it’s the first time I’ve ever seen the whole OSB crew have a meeting. At the time they called the meeting I had no clue what was up, but once I spoke with Steve, I knew what their meeting was about. I had heard some chatter on my radio shortly after the new operating crew took the train out of Trinidad, about things slowing down after ABQ, but I didn’t hear why. The engineer had told the dispatcher that he didn’t care about things after ABQ, since he would be relived there. Steve called me again just about noon, as the dining car was starting their lunch service, to let me know that he had gotten an Amtrak agent on the phone who had told him that we would be bussed from ABQ to Gallup. Still no word of this from our crew yet, although one passenger in our sleeper later told us that Carol had made an announcement in the sleeping car, but since we were in the lounge we never heard that. Finally just about 1:00 PM, I heard our conductor and the A/C start discussing when to make the announcement. They decided to make it just after we left Las Vegas, NM, which came at 12:48 PM. The dining car from that point forward proceeded to try and rush lunch, so that they had time to pack. Now I don’t mean that we were rushed out of the car, as we were given plenty of time to eat. But they did rush the remaining seatings trying to get people into the diner ASAP. For example they called our 1:30 seating at 1:20 and they called the 2:00 PM seating by 1:35. Once we finished lunch, we headed back to our room to pack up our stuff in preparation for detraining. Sadly we missed the last part of the guided tour in the lounge car because of this, although we could have gone back to the lounge for the last part after we packed. But we just didn’t bother to do that. We arrived into ABQ at 3:49 PM, where upon the mass exodus from the train started.

[AlanB]

As we were climbing down the inside stairs, I could hear someone from the station telling the conductor to tell the passengers to look for buses from a company called Paradise. The conductor replied that making an announcement at that point would be useless, since half the people were already off the train and would not hear any announcement. I of course, unlike the rest of my fellow passengers knew what to look for thanks to that little exchange. After getting out of the car, my mother and I rolled our suitcase down the ramp and right over to one of the Paradise buses that I had seen from the platform. They weren’t yet loading the buses and most people were still milling around and/or still coming off the train and the platform. My best description of the transfer would be “controlled chaos”. Part of the chaos was caused by the fact that of the six buses Amtrak had contracted for; only three were actually at the station for our arrival. I’m not sure if that was due to the fact that they didn’t need 6 buses for train #4’s load or if those bus driver just took their buses and went looking for food while they were waiting. The other part of the problem was that Amtrak had either not positioned the passengers from train #4 some place so as to not be in our way, or those passengers just didn’t follow their instructions. I’m not sure what happened there, but in any event this helped to create some confusion since we were commingling. It did seem like Amtrak had pulled out all of the stops as it were and I’d bet that they had just about every worker assigned to the ABQ station there to assist people. There were even a couple of local policemen on hand to help out. I’m not sure why they were there, if they were also Amtrak employee’s part time and then officer’s full time, but nonetheless they were there. I noticed one employee in part because I kept hearing her name on the scanner, Andy, who seemed to more or less be in charge of the operation. IMHO, she seemed to be doing a very good job under very difficult and trying circumstances. It can’t be east to coordinate the transfer of over 250 passengers on less than 10 hours notice. Andy certainly seemed to be every where and answering dozens of questions via the radio at the same time. My kudos to her. Probably the biggest part of the confusion as I mentioned above, simply came from the fact that 3 of the buses were missing in action when we detrained. This slowed down the loading process considerably, as those who weren’t first in line at the other three buses were left standing on the sidewalk for a while. This was a bit of a problem since it was also threatening to rain on people. Most, but not all of our OBS crew boarded one bus and we quickly boarded the bus that I had lined us up for after storing our luggage in the cargo area below, since I didn’t want to be stuck outside if it did start to rain. The OBS crew did walk around trying to assist pax, taking head counts on buses so as to let those in charge know how many box lunches to put on each bus, along with free water for everyone. While there wasn’t much of a selection, either a ham sandwich or a roast beef sandwich, everyone did get something to eat for free. There was no difference between coach pax and sleeper pax at this point, everyone got something. Of course this meant that those of us in sleepers missed out on what I suspect would have been another great meal, despite the restrictions imposed by SDS. It was clear from dinner the night before, and even the cheeseburger that I’d had for lunch, that our chef knew what he was doing in the kitchen. Thanks to the missing buses, despite our early arrival into ABQ, we didn’t leave until well after the scheduled departure time. Scheduled out of ABQ is 4:35 PM, our bus didn’t leave till 4:59 and ours was the second bus to depart. The bus carrying the OBS crew along with some pax left about 5 minutes before we did. Our driver however had a bit more of a lead foot than did the driver of the first bus, as we passed them up about 20 minutes out of Gallup. So we in fact arrived first at Gallup, with the second bus about 2 or 3 minutes behind us. I’d say that the overall trip took just over 1 and a half hours. I’m not sure how much later the other 4 buses left ABQ, but it couldn’t have been too much later, as I’d say that all buses were in Gallup by around 7:40 to 7:45. Our attendant Carol was on the third bus to arrive, about 5 minutes after ours and once she climbed into our new 331 car, she allowed us to start boarding. Since I knew which car would be the 331 car, I had started a line there and many others followed me. Several even asked me how I knew that would be our car. We quickly settled back into our new room. Thanks to this transfer we had gone from Superliner I sleeper to a Superliner II sleeper. This also gave us a working shower, since the shower that I had used when our consist was the Capitol Limited, stopped working before we arrived in Trinidad. They couldn’t get it working in Trinidad, so I was forced to use the shower in the 330 car that morning. Just about 8:00 PM the conductor made an announcement telling us that everyone was onboard, but that we were still waiting for the truck carrying the checked baggage to show up. Apparently either that driver didn’t have a lead foot or it took longer to transfer the bags, than it did to transfer the passengers. Finally about 8:10 I saw the truck drive down alongside the train and they started loading up the baggage car. We finally highballed Gallup at 8:30 PM, just about an hour and a half down. However we would loose still more time before the night was over. I took this opportunity to walk through the train trying to write down the consist info. For some odd reason, it seemed that more than half the doors were not working on the train. In fact the door at our end of the car was one of them. It wouldn’t close under any circumstances. This hindered my ability to write down some of the car numbers. I finally did manage to get almost all of them, except for the closed sightseer lounge, and they’ll appear in the final report. While the consist had been sitting, it would appear that they had taken the lounge out of the middle and tacked it onto the rear after the last coach. I have no idea why the lounge was out of action, but it was nonetheless closed for our use. And its door was open, so I never got that number. Oddly enough, we were also going to bring three ExpressTrak box cars back to LA with us. I was kind of surprised by this, as I figured that they’d just leave them there for the next train running through to pick up. No clue if they were empties or full. For at our next stop, Winslow, they would refuel our three loco’s. I’m not sure why it wasn’t done in Gallup, since the ponies were sitting there for several hours, but it wasn’t. So we spent 59 minutes fueling the engines, before moving into the station for 2 minutes work boarding/disembarking passengers. Our arrival was at 9:49, with our departure at 10:51 PM. That was the last stop that I recall seeing as we went off to bed not too long after that. I’ll finish the final leg of this trip in my next installment, which I probably won’t get posted till tomorrow.